The specification relates to making conference calls in a social stream, for example, a social network. In particular, the specification relates to a conferencing module that establishes a conference call for an affinity group, calls the participants and transmits notifications to the affinity group.
In social streams, such as instant messaging, email, blogs and social networks, users generate conversation threads that are organized according to time. A real-time discussion through social streams can be quite difficult, especially when there are more than two participants and they are using different types of social media to communicate. As a result, trying to organize a simple meeting, such as seeing a movie or planning a business lunch can be overly burdensome.
Some cell phones offer a feature where a user that receives a text message, email or instant message from someone who is a contact in the user's address book can call the sender. This is fine if the conversation is only between two people, but it fails to solve the problem of communicating with more than two people on more than a single medium.